COURSE POLICIES
MATH 104: CALCULUS I
INSTRUCTORS: DANIEL COONEY, BRETT FRANKEL, NADIA OTT, MIRA PETERKA, NAKIA
RIMMER, PATRICK SHIELDS
1. Administrative Details
1.1. Course Structure. . In a typical week, you will watch “textbook” videos on Canvas,
complete two prep quizzes on Canvas, retake the previous week’s prep quizzes, attend lecture
once, attend recitation once, and take a quiz on Friday.
The videos on Canvas will introduce you to the ideas for the course. The prep quizzes,
which are essentially low-stakes homework assignments, will give you a chance to practice
and assess your initial understanding of what you have just watched.
Class will be fairly open-ended and interactive; this is a good time for you to ask questions!
The exact format and content of each class will be up to your instructor.
In recitation, you will work on the week’s worksheet. We strongly encourage you to work
in groups. The reason you work on the worksheet during recitation, rather than just at
home, is to give you a chance to ask your TA for assistance while you are working. It is
much easier to solve problems when there is an expert in the room waiting to help you out!
There will typically be too many problems to solve during recitation, and you might not yet
know enough to solve all the problems, especially if your recitation is on Monday or Tuesday.
You will have plenty of time to finish up the worksheet on your own before turning it in.
We will have a quiz most Fridays. There will be no midterms, but there is a final exam.
Wait a second! We’re finally back in the classroom, and you still want us to watch videos
online? Why? We in fact had planned to move to a “flipped classroom” format even before
the pandemic. By moving the usual “lecture” content outside of class time, we have more
time in class for other activities that will help you solidify your understanding. Although you
cannot easily ask questions of a video the way you might during a lecture, we will have a lot
more class time available to focus on your questions. It might sound like this format is a lot
more work because you now have to watch videos on your own time, but we can assign less
homework because of all the practice you get in class and recitation. In the traditional version
of this class, many students reported spending hours and hours every night on homework.
Many universities around the country are now teaching “flipped” versions of calculus and
other STEM courses, and our own experience has shown us that our students learn much
better this way.
1.2. Canvas. Canvas will be your go-to resource for the entire course. Check Canvas for a
class schedule, videos, online assignments, handouts, announcements, and more. Make sure
Canvas messages are forwarded to your email so that you receive them promptly. Almost
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anything you wish to know about the course can be found on Canvas (though it’s okay to ask
your instructor if you have already looked and need help locating some Canvas resources!)
1.3. Contact Information. Email is the only official medium through which you may get
in touch with the course staff. You should assume that messages sent using Canvas or any
other electronic communication system besides email will not reach their intended recipients.
While you are welcome to send emails at any time, emails sent outside of business hours
might not be read until the next business day.
We will frequently use Canvas to send class-wide announcements. You should make sure
that Canvas announcements are sent to your email.
E-mail is a terrible medium for discussing mathematics, but you can e-mail your instructor about administrative matters.
All instructor and TA email addresses will be posted on Canvas.
1.4. Office hours. Office hours will be posted on Canvas. You never need an appointment
for regularly-scheduled office hours, and you may attend the office hours of anyone whose
name is on our Canvas site, not just your own instructor and TA.
1.5. Textbook. The mathematics department is committed to saving you money when it
can, so you do not need to purchase any books or software licenses. Everything you need
will be available for free on Canvas. We will use a video “textbook,” by Penn Professor
Robert Ghrist. For a few lectures, we will also have available a brand new set of videos, the
beginnings of “Calculus Green,” by the same author.
1.6. Prep quizzes. Prep quizzes will consist of problems that can be graded automatically,
in Canvas, for instant feedback. These problems will generally be simpler and more skillsbased. You may work together, as long as your discussions are truly collaborative and you
are not just sharing answers.
Each prep quiz will come with a redo opportunity, typically due the following Monday.
We will keep only the higher score out of each prep quiz and its redo. If you miss a prep
quiz or its redo, we will only count the other.
1.7. Written homework. Homework will generally consist of a few more involved questions. Most weeks you will have the opportunity to start the homework during recitation.
We strongly encourage you to complete written homework in groups, although you should
write up your final submission by yourself and make sure that you can carry out all arguments and computations independently before committing them to paper. We plan to
collect homework weekly, usually on Wednesdays. You may turn in written homework up
to 24 hours late for 50% credit, after which time we cannot accept it unless you have been
granted an extension.
All written homework should be turned in via Canvas in pdf format. We recommend
writing your solutions neatly on paper and then taking a picture using a free app like CamScanner. Please be advised that other means of submission substantially hinder our ability
to provide feedback to the class in a timely manner. We will accept email submissions only in
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the case when technical difficulties prevent submission via Canvas; in such instances, email
submissions will be very welcome.
We will grade homework for completion. The homework problems are designed to challenge you! It might happen that you are unable to solve some problems. If you write down a
short note about what you tried and why you believe that approach is not working, we will
count that problem as complete. Be sure to come to office hours to discuss any problems
you were unable to solve!
1.8. Quizzes. You will take a quiz most Fridays. There will be a total of 11 quizzes,
including three redo quizzes. Redo quizzes will consist of material that could have appeared
(even if it didn’t) on the previous two or three quizzes. We will count only the best three
out of Quiz 1, Quiz 2, Quiz 3, and the first redo quiz. We will likewise count only the best
three out of Quiz 4, Quiz 5, Quiz 6, and the second redo quiz. The third redo quiz might
also contain some new material that you did not learn in time for inclusion on quizzes 7 and
8. We will count only the best two of Quiz 7, Quiz 8, and this last redo quiz. You may
bring one single-sided handwritten (in your own hand) sheet of notes to each quiz. Your
note sheet may be collected, and you will not get it back.
We will try to accommodate schedule conflicts for job interviews, university athletics, and
legitimate emergencies as they arise. Please email Nakia Rimmer (rimmer@math.upenn.edu)
right away if you need to be moved to a different quiz seating. If you miss a quiz, even if
you missed it for a valid reason, you will not receive credit. Because of our system of redo
quizzes, missing a quiz should not have a catastrophic impact on your grade.
1.9. Final exam. The course will conclude with a traditional final exam. The registrar
has scheduled our final for December 20 at 9am. The final will be reasonably similar to old
final exams, but this semester it will be a bit shorter and carry less weight towards your
overall grade for the course than final exams from before the pandemic. You may bring one
double-sided sheet of handwritten (in your own hand) notes to the final. Students who miss
the final exam will have to take a make-up at the start of the spring semester.
1.10. Late work. Late work will generally be denied credit. However, we anticipate that
during these trying times, personal crises are more likely than ever to arise, whether or not
they are directly related to the pandemic. In any of these instances, the key is to communicate
with us as soon as you can. We will endeavor to make reasonable accommodations. Please
contact Nakia Rimmer (rimmer@math.upenn.edu) as soon as possible if you have a situation
that requires an extension or other accommodation.
1.11. Remote and in-person Instruction. We intend to hold the vast majority of this
course in person. However, because of quirks in the schedule and limits on classroom capacity,
we will very occasionally hold class on Zoom. We may also hold review sessions over Zoom
(and post the recordings) in order to make space for everyone who wishes to attend. We will
notify you in advance, via Canvas, when the course will meet online. Staff illness/isolation
could force a class onto Canvas at short notice, though this will hopefully be rare. We will
all adapt together (including possible changes to course policies) if the university is forced
to switch back to fully remote instruction.
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Please note that for security reasons, you should be signed into your Penn Zoom account
for any Zoom meetings. Note that this account is not the same as the Zoom account
associated with your email. To make sure you are signed in correctly, sign out of Zoom, then
select SSO when signing back in. Type upenn.edu as your domain name, then sign in as
promted using your PennKey.
1.12. Grades. Grades will be posted on Canvas.
We will compute your numerical grades as follows: Prep quizzes 10%, quizzes 40%, final
exam 20%, and homework 30%.
Please be aware that, since assessments vary in difficulty from term to term, there is no
predetermined rule for converting numerical grades into letter grades. A numerical grade of
90% does not necessarily guarantee you an A. Conversely, if the median score on a quiz is
50%, that only means that it was a very challenging quiz, and you should not worry that
half the class is failing. We will treat all fourteen sections as a single class for the purpose of
computing grades. Grades below C- will be decided on a case-by-case basis; we do not have
a predetermined number of students who will fail, so it is entirely possible (and would make
us very happy!) that every single student will pass the course.
1.13. Accommodations. Students requiring academic accommodations should register their
needs with the office of Student Disabilities Services (SDS). Instructors and TAs can not provide any academic accommodations without prior instruction from SDS. In addition, if you
plan to register a disability with that office which will require any action, you should email
Brett Frankel (frankelb@sas.upenn.edu) within 48 hours of joining the course, even if your
accommodations have not yet been registered or approved. You do not need to disclose of
the nature of your accommodations or disability, but knowing that you are registered makes
it easier to work with SDS to get your the accommodations you need.
2. How to Succeed in this Course
2.1. Embrace Challenge. Learning calculus is challenging in even the best of times, and
these are not the best of times. It is normal to feel confusion and even frustration. The key
is to be embrace challenge as a normal and healthy part of the learning process.
Furthermore, our curriculum begins with some particularly challenging and probably
unfamiliar topics. We are not starting with these ideas to shock you! By introducing these
topics early, we are giving you tools that will make other portions of class easier later on.
Introducing some hard topics early also means that you have more time to master them over
the course of the semester. We know from experience that Penn students find our approach
very difficult at first, but ultimately overcome these challenges and do better overall than
the do in the more traditional curriculum.
Unlike in traditional lecture courses, we will at least partially follow an “active learning”
approach in which you will spend a substantial portion of class and recitation time working
in small groups on problems or disucssion questions. Because the more self-paced nature of
group work means you will naturally spend more time on problems you find difficult, it is
easy to get the impression that you are doing poorly, or that class time is not constructive,
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when in fact you are spending most of your time on the exact skills you need to work on.
Research has consistently shown that this course format leads to better learning for students,
but that students feel like they are learning less. In short, you are probably doing better
than you realize.
2.2. Homework. It is highly unlikely that you will succeed in this class without doing the
homework. We will move very quickly, and nearly everything is cumulative. We will learn a
number of different types of computations. The only way to become proficient is to do tons
of problems, so you may need to do additional problems beyond what we assign. One great
source of problems is the archive of old final exams on the department web page.
2.3. Participate Actively. A core component of this course, at the heart of the learning
experience, will be our in-class meetings and recitations. During some of this time, we
will ask you to work actively in small groups to tackle challenging mathematical problems.
Growth happens when you have to grapple with unfamiliar ideas; if we expected you to
already know all the answers, we wouldn’t ask the questions.
When you don’t know the answer, share what you do know, or give it your best guess. You
will never be penalized for a wrong answer during class discussions. Better yet, neuroscience
research shows that when we make mistakes and then correct them, our synapses fire multiple
times, and we learn more than we would from getting the answer right on the first try.
2.4. Get Help! Most of you will need help with something or other at some point during
the course. Attending office hours for help is a normal, healthy part of the learning process,
even for very good students.
In addition to your instructor, Penn has numerous resources to support your success
in math. These include drop-in help at the Math-Physics help room and Math Centers,
tutoring, and general academic support through the Weingarten Learning Resource Center. You might need to check with the individual centers to see when and how they are
operating now that instruction is all remote. The department also maintains a list of
expensive private tutors, but with so many free resources available, you are mostly paying for convenience. You can find more details on the department’s calculus web page,
https://www.math.upenn.edu/undergraduate/getting-help/calculus-help.
While we expect you to submit your own authentic work on assessments, there is no
penalty or stigma for using outside services to help you understand the material, and we
encourage you to take full advantage of all of these resources.
3. Ethics and Environment
3.1. Pandemic Information. Masks are required to be properly worn at all times in the
classroom. If you are symptomatic or test positive, you must stay home and file a course
absence report on Penn InTouch. Faculty and TAs are required to report failure to comply
with safety precautions to the university for disciplinary action. If you have to miss class for
COVID-related reasons, we will work with you to keep you caught up. Because all so much
of the course content (and office hours) is available online, needing to miss class for a week
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or two due to quarantine or mild illness will not leave you at a serious deficit. Contact Nakia
Rimmer (rimmer@sas.upenn.edu), along with your instructor, if health conditions require a
more prolonged absence and/or prevent you from completing coursework at home.
3.2. Teamwork. Research has repeatedly confirmed that we work best when we treat learning as a social activity. You are encouraged to work with classmates on homework assignments and during class discussions, whether you are able to join the synchronous course
sessions or create your own alternative sessions. Keep in mind that we are all learning,
and that mistakes and misconceptions are a normal part of the learning process. Please
remember to focus your constructive criticism on your classmates’ ideas, not the classmates
themselves. And, if you are shy, try to push yourself slightly outside your comfort zone by
sharing your ideas with those around you a little more than you otherwise would.
3.3. Academic Integrity. Although we encourage you to use all available sources as you
work to master the course content, our academic community relies on honesty and proper
attribution of ideas.
We love it when you solve and discuss homework problems with classmates, but you must
write up your own work. If you use a tutor, you may discuss homework problems but may
not write them up for submission while your tutor is on the clock. No collaboration, books,
notes, electronic devices, or other outside resources are allowed during quizzes unless you
are instructed otherwise. If you’re not sure what is within the rules, just ask! There is never
anything wrong with asking your instructor for clarification. We may pursue any infractions
with the Office of Student Conduct. Penalties for cheating could include (but are not limited
to) failing assignments, failing the course, a note in your official file, or even expulsion from
the university.
3.4. Discrimination and Harassment. Your peers are your most valuable learning resource, and it is imperative that we maintain a welcoming environment, inside and outside
of class, where every single student is empowered as a member of the course community. We
take all of Penn’s discrimination and harassment policies very seriously.
3.5. Resources. Penn has a number of resources to support students who are differentlyabled, need help affording classroom materials, are facing physical or mental health issues,
need academic support, need technology support, or have been victims of harassment or
inappropriate behavior by others. We will be more than happy to help you navigate those
resources. You will never be penalized in any way for seeking out the resources you need.
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